“Game based learning” is a misleading term. After all, gaming always involves learning. You learn who the bad guys are, how to shoot, how to jump, how to run, where the secret portals are. Gaming is constant learning.

Life is also constant learning. You’re learning when you scroll through your Facebook timeline. You‘re learning when you buy yourself a jelly donut. You’re learning even as you walk down the street and take in all of the sensory data about the world around you. But we generally use the word “learning” when we’re talking about the process of incorporating and understanding intentionally structured data sets--when we’re talking about the process of coming to understand complex systems.

Game based learning works because all video games are complex systems. Being able to play Donkey Kong involves understanding the complicated relationship between various elements in a system. How does one thing impact another? What’s the deal with those oil barrels and fireballs? How does the universe of the game respond to certain actions? What happens when you ride elevators and climb ladders? How do unique virtual physics engines manifest as the time and space of the game’s user interface?

These are just some of the questions that we’re forced to answer on the fly as we’re playing a video game, as we’re learning to navigate the game world. When it comes to systems thinking, the game world is not so different from the life world.

The great physicist Richard Feynman used to say that physics was like discovering a giant game of chess in midplay and trying to extrapolate the rules of the game based only on watching the few pieces we are able to see--maybe two pawns and a rook. Translate that metaphor to video games. Imagine you can only see Mario jumping for a level’s final flag and from that you had to figure out all of rules of the mushroom kingdom. Good luck.

There are forces much larger than us thumbing away at their gamepads, moving these avatars around a complex game world. And what we do, as humans, is look for systematic ways to make sense of this chaotic chess game--of this chaotic game world in which we happen to be primary players. See, we know how to play, we just don’t know how to describe it.

So, we tell stories. We organize the chaotic reality of existence into systems, narratives, and patterns. We try to provide a meaningful order to our experience because stories and systems enable participation. Stories and systems enable relationships. They let us talk to each other. They let us establish common ground. Stories and systems are the building blocks of human civilization. What we do in schools--the fundamental reason for education--is to transmit, from one generation to the next, the systematic descriptions of the universe that our civilization finds most useful.

There are many systems. Thousands of years worth. For most of recorded history, humans have done this kind of systems creation in more or less the same way: we tell linear stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.

Then, a few decades ago, something happened. We began to construct knowledge differently. Now, on the web, information no longer has the narrative arc that Aristotle laid out 23 hundred years ago in Rhetoric and Poetics. Instead, now things are non-linear. Queries open, they hyperlink endlessly around a web, and then they hover permanently in the realm of networked possibilities.

This is a monumental shift for humanity. And it is not, as the media and the technocrats would have us believe, the result of internet technologies. The web is not changing humanity. Humanity has already changed. We’ve already changed in such a significant way that our perception of the world around us, consciousness itself, has been fundamentally shaken. But these changes did not happen because of technology. The internet is not that strong. Rather, what happened was, our thinking changed and we didn’t have the tools to interact with the world in a way that resonated with this revolutionary new way of systematically organizing experience. We still don’t. So we continue to build new tools. We built the internet because we needed a tool that would allow us to utilize these new non linear ways of constructing systematic knowledge. Remember: Tools do not change us, we change tools.

We used to tell linear stories about heroes, like Heracles. Heracles went through twelve labors and each one was like a level of a video game. It demanded mastery before he could level-up. In many ways, Heracles can be considered the prototypical hero. Maybe even the first ever video game avatar. Like a gamer, he’s dropped into challenges, tests, and pre-determined trials. Each trial is a system.

The monsters of ancient Greek mythology are not unpredictable like irrational humans. Instead, they are otherworldly beings that each adhere to particular rules, particular laws. Each one has a specific systematic logic. The Hydra, for example, is a nine headed serpent-like dragon with poisonous breath and deadly blood. Every time you cut off one head, two more grow unless you cauterize the decapitated stump with flames. Heracles figures this system out, as well as 11 others. He masters each level of the game. He uses his power-ups--his strength, his agility, his wit--to best navigate the system of each challenge. He beats each level, defeats the boss, and wins the game.

Today, many of our modern movies and video games still borrow narrative tropes from the stories of the ancient Greek heroes because these stories still resonate. More often than not education technology works this way. Many of our so called “innovations” draw their structural logic from the hero archetype. Consider MOOCS and Kahn academy, both are great in terms of distribution, in that they make quality educational content widely accessible. But on the other hand, when educators present a subject as content to be shared, it becomes like a heroic trial, something to test, something to be mastered, something to conquer, something to overcome. When that happens, you know that we’re caught in a heroic way of thinking.

In the mythological, heroic worldview, the universe is imagined as a top down construction in which the gods have all the power. It is an oligarchy, or maybe a plutocracy. The gods hand us the game levels. They hand us the trials. They hand us the systems.

Kind of like the sage on the stage classroom. The teacher is like the god or the monarch, the ultimate authority in the room. The knowledge and the tasks are predefined. And the individual students, although heroic, have no agency. The change in students from year to year, or semester to semester, is like kids taking turns playing an algorithmically predetermined arcade game.

In this model, individuals are irrelevant. Heroes are irrelevant. Heracles is irrelevant. The great French mythologist Jean-Pierre Vernant once wrote that in classic myth the exploits of heroes “are valid in themselves and on their own account, quite apart from the hero performing them.” In other words, Heracles is just an avatar. He’s an everyman, like Pac Man, or Frogger, or Sonic the Hedgehog. “He does not perform the impossible because he is a hero; rather, he is a hero because he has performed the impossible.”

This is the mindset of high stakes testing. Our 20th Century education system is not only a “Factory” model of education, but also a “Heroic” model of education. And this also happens to be how things looked for most of ancient history, likely for hundreds of thousands of years. Probably, for all of the time even before humans started to write down stories, individuals only imagined that they had the agency to respond to the world. The universe was like an early Atari game: it threw challenges at the players and the humans played it like little children. They guessed, prayed, and hoped that the world would present in its easiest iteration.

Then, in the 5th Century BC, something changes. One of the best representations of that change comes from a Philosopher named Anaximander who imagined a cosmology of the universe that was geometric. That is, it was located in space. It was no longer an ancestral series of gods that begot gods--like the Titans who preceded the Olympians who preceded the Demi-gods and the Heroes who preceded the kings and their subjects. Instead, Anaximander defined the world as a product of the distance, or the geometry, between elements with equal rights, elements connected through symmetrical forces. It described celestial bodies as mechanical nodes in a rational interconnected system that followed natural laws of cause and effect.

With this new cosmology, Anaximander set the stage for scientific thought, for Democracy, for the enlightenment, for physics as we know it, for the discovery of electricity, and for the invention of video game consoles. But if all that happened in the 5th Century BC, why do we still teach as if we are living in the age of heroic mythology? Why do we continue to teach and organize our school system using undemocratic, oligarchic, heroic, top-down structures? I’m not sure. But I do know that if we want to educate citizens for a thriving democratic society, we need to abandon a heroic model of education.

After all, the only reason we teach anything--math, literature, history, physics--is so that we can use the knowledge to make meaning in the context of our world. It is so we can apply those skills to the video game of life. When we approach from a heroic perspective, however, we forget that we have the power to construct our own rules, that it is OUR game.

This is one reason why I believe schools should be hurrying to embrace game based learning. Learning games are designed to let students interact with the elements that make up a system. The player gets to enter an unknown world and experiment within it. Good learning games are just interactive simulations with a dopamine based reward system. Students don’t just get fed content. They get to learn by trial and error. They get to develop an iterative understanding of the subject matter. They get to experiment and see how their actions have an impact on the system.

Students educated to be democratic citizens need to imagine knowledge not as data transmitted into biological hard drive, but rather as the wisdom that enables one thing to interact responsibly with another. If Anaximander’s approach to the cosmos had such a profound impact on the trajectory on human knowledge, opening the portal that enabled science and democracy, imagine what could happen if we teach an entire generation of children to experience everything, even themselves, as interdependent nodes in much larger systems.

See, it is important to remember that we are never just teaching content. We are always teaching content in some way. There's always an underlying message that resides in the structure of our pedagogy.

What is the message in the Heroic model of education? Well, at the risk of oversimplifying things, I’d argue that it contextualizes academic content within a narrative of fierce ownership, individual ambition, commodified rewards, private property: conquer, master, overpower. They are MY grades, MY education, MY opportunity to get ahead in the world (usually by leaving someone else behind). We learn that the usefulness of engineering skills, for instance, lies in their ability to build personal wealth, or at best, wealth for one particular team--maybe a corporation, or a city, or a nationalist/separatist identity. Being successful means working your way to the front of the room, becoming the plutocrat at the top of the ladder.